


again, again, again, again

by krebkrebkreb



Series: recursive [1]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Canon Dialogue, Canon Rewrite (sort-of), Character Study, Episode: Revolution of the Daleks, Episode: s12e10 The Timeless Children, F/M, Far Too Many Parentheticals, Introspection, Just a Little Bit of Kissing, Memory Loss, POV The Doctor (Doctor Who), Post-Episode: Revolution of the Daleks, Post-Episode: s12e10 The Timeless Children, Prison, The Doctor (Doctor Who) Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-15 03:55:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29927532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/krebkrebkreb/pseuds/krebkrebkreb
Summary: The Doctor is, undeniably, a coward.(A character study and expansion on the events during, between, and just after The Timeless Children and Revolution of the Daleks)
Relationships: The Doctor (Doctor Who)/Companion(s), Thirteenth Doctor/Jack Harkness
Series: recursive [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2209011
Comments: 12
Kudos: 21





	again, again, again, again

####  _1\. (the timeless children)_

The Doctor stands with the miniaturized Cyberman in her hand, the Death Particle safely in its chest. Through their mental connection, the Master’s laugh is cruel and cold. There is no happiness in it.

She looks at the figure in her fingers. Left you a gift, he had said. Why?

Why shrink the Cyberman at all, with that universally deadly and horribly named Death Particle lurking inside it? Why, when he must have known how dangerous that could be? When he surely knew how it could have undone all of his plans?

Perhaps it is just that her old friend, her old enemy, knows her so _well_. Leaving this taunting reminder of how she once thought she destroyed everything…

Something clicks in her mind with that realization. Between one breath and the next, the Doctor makes a decision that she feels isn’t really a decision at all.

While she has always felt as though she understood the underlying motives for his mendacity, the truth is that she has always played right into the Master’s hand and then just barely, barely gotten out of danger. The Doctor doesn’t have anything to pray to, but if she did she would probably consider praying that she escapes this one too.

(She has a feeling that the Master intends for neither of them to leave this planet again.)

“You and me,” she demands to the Master’s mind, “Matrix Chamber. No one else. One last time.”

There’s a corridor of parked TARDISes right where she knew (hoped) there would be, and she spares a thought for those beautifully sentient and wonderfully alive machines and all of the Time Lords who won’t ever be returning to take them away again.

Once she’s herded her humans into one and set the destination, the Doctor looks to Ko Sharmus. “Any explosives left?”

“One. Emergencies only.” He pulls out one of the very same type of charges they must have used on the cyber carrier. 

“Timer?” Please, please…

Ko Sharmus grips the device tightly, expression grim. “Hand detonation only.”

She huffs out a breath, something near a sigh but harsher. Hand detonation to avoid being converted? It makes a horrible kind of sense. “Yeah. Course.” She turns to him. “I’ll take it.”

When he hands it over it feels like light plastic and thin metal and heavy inevitability.

(Had the Moment felt like this? That’s the trouble with crossing your own timeline three ways at once: it’s so hard to remember it clearly.)

“So come on, Doc,” Graham starts, looking nervous. Looking scared. “What are you thinking?” She can almost read his mind in his expression: What’s our way out? Doc, you always have a way out.

And she does, for them. She’s not so sure she would be able to go through with this plan to destroy Gallifrey (again) if she had to take them with her.

(Not that she had really gone through with it the first time, during the Time War. But the memories of how it felt when she had along with something she very much does not want to label as trauma still linger.)

“One option left.” She holds up the miniaturized Cyberman, so light in the fingers of her right hand. The Doctor has saved a lot of worlds with this hand, but the action she’s about to take feels very, very different than anything a savior might do. “I have to use the Death Particle on Gallifrey. On my home. On the Master and his new breed of Cybermen.”

She’s saying these things like she’s telling them to herself, making it true with every word.

(Why does the truth have to be this?)

“You sure you want to do that?” Ryan asks, like he’s trying to give her a way out. A way out that just doesn’t exist.

“I’m sure I don’t want to do that, but there’s no alternative.” She explains what will happen, the terrible consequences to the entire universe if the Cybermen are allowed to escape. Then, she admits to what’s weighing down her hearts, hoping they will understand: “I started this with Shelley and the Cyberium and now I have to finish it. Alone.”

“What?” Yaz sounds sad, like she doesn’t want to believe what she’s hearing.

Oh, Yaz. Clever Yaz. The Doctor knew she would figure this out the fastest and tries so hard to bury the guilt under pride in her friend so that she can keep going, so that she can just get through explaining their part of the plan: Return to, settle in the 21st century. Live good lives.

“What about you? If you detonate that thing, you’ll die too.” Ryan sounds like he’s not sure she really knows this, but she does. She knows, and it terrifies her. Death, after finding out she’s already lost innumerable years and regenerations to stolen memory?

The Doctor doesn’t even feel like she owes a debt of life. Not really. It’s not as though she holds herself responsible for the regenerative abilities of these new CyberMasters. That was all the Master; the work of her genome to engineer the Time Lords—and that’s a new thought she has no time to process: how _old_ must she be?—is in no way her fault. But the Cyberium? She should have better heeded Jack’s warning. She should have been cleverer. She should have found some different way when she had the chanc, that night in 1816 which had happened both days and centuries ago.

(But _could_ she have? The Cyber-Wars and all that followed are something she has always known as having happened.)

(Have the horrors of these far distant future days _always_ been her fault?)

The Doctor takes a small, fortifying breath then tries (and fails) to give her friends a smile to remember her by. “That’s the way it has to be. I would do that in a heartbeat for this universe. For you… my fam.” That word—originally some off the cuff wordplay, later an easy way to make Yaz and Ryan roll their eyes at her in that so fond way that lifts the heavy blanket of her loneliness just a bit—means so very much more now. Fam. _Family_. Hers, among the stars.

She’s lost her family once. More than once. Again and again she’s lost them, different people but always the same love and always the same hurt. And here now it’s happening in reverse. They’re losing her. 

The expressions on their faces cuts into her deep. She knows she’s leaving them abruptly, sending them back home with their trauma and their wounds fully open to a world not prepared to deal with it or the things that have seen.

At least they’ll live.

She turns away to go, guilt clawing its way across her ribs and into her chest.

Yaz lunges, grabbing her arm. “We’re not letting you go,” she shouts in the Doctor’s face. “You’re not doing this!”

The Doctor shrugs the hand violently away. “Get off me, Yaz!” She looks solemnly at the human. Yaz is so young and oh, oh, she owes this brilliant girl so more than an ending like _this_ but there isn’t any other option. “Please.”

It’s Ryan who backs the Doctor. Sweet, kind Ryan who asks Yaz to stay on this TARDIS and go back to Earth, go back home. This isn’t completely a surprise, but it’s heartbreaking in a whole new way. She took this beautiful kid and showed him the stars and the horrors among them and in the process she hardened him to the world. Made him someone like her, who can make decisions no one should ever have to. Weaponized him. 

“Live great lives,” she says, feeling ill.  


The Doctor doesn’t dare use the sonic to help attach the Cyberman to the bomb. A few little magnets and some glue from somewhere deep in a pocket do the job instead. If she were to slip up and trigger it early, her fam might not get away. And she needs to speak to the Master, one last time.

How funny, this person she is now. How she has changed from the man she was just three faces ago. Right now she is a version of herself who always, _always_ gives second chances, last chances.

(Hate is always foolish. She remembers the instructions of her old face very well.)

After her preparations are done, as she leaves the TARDIS corridor and walks back to the Matrix Chamber, she feels an emptiness spreading where the guilt and sickness had been.

There is no alternative, she reminds herself. No other way.

When she arrives in the Matrix Chamber, the Master stands surrounded by his bespoke monsters in their robes and headdresses.

The Doctor quips an admonishment at him about no plus ones, neither disappointed nor surprised to see that he has brought with him these grotesque reminders of her purpose. She never really expected that he would come alone.

The Cybermen raise their hands in unison to point their wrist weapons at her.

“You gonna have them shoot me?” she asks, spreading her arms wide as she takes the stairs down to meet him face to face on the central platform. The bomb swings in her pocket, a heavy weight against her leg.

The Master looks insane and unwell and she tells him so.

“The Cyberium lives within me now, Doctor,” he says in reply, and he _laughs_.

She stares at him, stares in disbelief at what he’s become with her eyes wide and her mouth hanging part way open. How do you still have emotions, she wants to ask, but doesn’t. How are you still you? Then she walks, looking but not seeing, stepping a few paces to the left so that she might view him and his madness from a different angle. How has such an unhinged, desperate man forced her into _this_? She supposes she’s desperate too, though she cannot see why.

“I’ve been looking forward to seeing your face about that.” And he goes on and on and on, about the Cyberium and how beautiful an experience this is for him. And then—“I have broken you,” he declares.

Has he really no idea?

“You think you’ve broken me? You’ll have to try harder than that.” Harder than destroying everything, harder than corrupting their _people_. “You’ve given me a gift.” She thinks of the one gift he knows he gave, the tiny Cyberman in her pocket, and corrects herself: “Of myself. You think that could destroy me? You think that makes me lesser? It makes me _more_. I contain multitudes more than I ever thought or knew. You want me to be scared of it because you’re scared of everything, but I am so much more than you.”

They stare at each other for a tense moment. 

(She is more than him but she is also so, so frightened.)

“Wow,” he says, looking away. With an unimpressed chuckle he brushes off her words like so much dust. “So, why are we here?”

And now she steps back and draws her payload from her pocket. Now she shows him: the bomb, with the Cyberman attached. He gave her this weapon, this gift; did he expect her not to use it?

Horribly, she knows he expected that she would. 

“Very good,” he says with a sigh and a mad smile. “That’s why I left it for you. Wondering if you would take out me, take out them.” And he looks almost nervous despite his apparent pleasure, even as he continues to describe with glee all of the things she would be destroying on Gallifrey. He’s speaking just to hear his own words, reveling in them as he continues to try and tear her down.

And she thinks: this poor, insane man. Her poor old friend. No more will suffer for him.

“Do that, would you?” he asks, crouching to look up into her eyes as though she’s again as tall as she’s been in lifetimes before, as tall as she was in the lifetime they met.

“Yes,” she answers, voice thin. “This time, yes.”

“Go on, then. You were the start of all this, now finish it! Come on, come on. Come on!” The Master urges her on, so manically confident even as she holds the bomb in his face close enough to feel his breath on her knuckles; he’s courting an almost intimate death. “What have you got left, anyway? You don’t even know your own life. Look how low I have brought you. You may have won, Doctor, but I have destroyed you.”

She thinks about every dead Time Lord body still on the planet, dreading a future for them as Cybermen. Then she thinks of every TARDIS, still wonderfully, fantastically alive and brilliantly sentient and absolutely wholly undeserving of what she’s about to do.

(She thought she had destroyed them all once before. Must it always come back to this?)

Staring into the Master’s eyes, just above her thumb as it hovers over the button, she cannot read in them if he truly wants this or if the entire thing is as harrowing for him as she finds it.

“I have won, Doctor. You may have made me, but I have destroyed you. Become death,” he says darkly. “Become me. Come on. Come on, come on!”

She knows she needs to press the button. She’s shaking so hard that if it happens it may well wind up being an accident.

But she cannot do it (again) of her own free will, and he seems as disappointed in her as she is in herself.

(Ko Sharmus shows up and she does what she has always done best and _runs_.)

After that so strong, braver-than-her human saves her, she finds herself piloting a borrowed Type 60 TARDIS back to the planet where things began.

“Oh, yeah, nice,” she tells the ship, patting the ruddy brown trunk of its disguised form. “Good chameleon circuit. Gonna have to leave you there, though. I can think of worse places to spend eternity.”

Her blue box greets her, _her_ TARDIS, and she lays a hand on its wooden doorframe. “Hello, mate.” Has any sight ever been such a comforting relief as this box is every time?

The living machine whirs itself awake and she finds herself bantering with it with no thought to her words. Time to pick up her fam?

She slumps against the console. Maybe… maybe just a little time to process, first. This is a time machine, after all.

Except… A platoon of Judoon—who were _very much not invited_ to what has been one of the worst days she’s experienced in her very long life—are rude enough to beam into her TARDIS via transmat.

“Judoon cold case unit,” the leader barks. “Fugitive: The Doctor. Sentence: whole of life imprisonment, maximum security.”

The same transmat beam that let the Judoon invade takes them _all_ out and suddenly she is gone again.

(It looks like she will have a lot more time to process than she wanted.)

  
  


####  _2\. (interlude: in-between)_

She goes three cycles of day and night in the prison before realizing she should be counting.

After the sentencing, the original charge of simply being a fugitive added onto and onto and onto, her days settle into a mundane routine. Wake up, ablutions, a nutritious loaf of “food” for breakfast, a few hours pacing her little cube in the exercise yard, back to her real cell for another nutritious loaf dinner, scratch a mark into the wall to count off another day of her life spent, and then sleep. Has she ever slept this much, in any of her lives?

(What else is there to do here _but_ sleep?)

The only real variation to any of it is what occupies her mind.

Somewhere around tally mark four hundred and forty, it occurs to the Doctor that she has no idea how many regenerations she has left. She has had far beyond twelve now, further than she could have ever imagined. The Timeless Child alone went through so, so many faces.

(It’s hard still to think of that child as herself. She _remembers_ her childhood, and it wasn’t like that.)

How long will this whole of life imprisonment last, if she has so many lives to spare?

(Twenty-one thousand four hundred and ninety-seven marks on the wall after that, the Doctor realizes that the Timeless Child only wore so many faces because Tecteun must have killed her child again and again and again to study regeneration.)

(The Doctor realized this all the way back in the Matrix.)

(Thinking of doing that to her own children—no matter how distant a parent she had been—is a physically painful thing.)

For a little while around day eight hundred, the Doctor spends her time just screaming as loud as she can.  
  


Day one thousand is spent imagining a birthday party for the Solitract. It’s probably never had a birthday and doesn’t need to when its day of birth is the same as the day of birth for the whole of creation, but it’s a nice thought.

That night, the Doctor pretends her nutrition loaf is cake.

Six thousand two hundred and forty-four days into her sentence, the Doctor decides that River must have had such an easy time of it in Stormcage only because she kept breaking out. 

(She knows, however, that River didn’t have an easy time of it at all. It is so, so hard for one like either of them to stay so still.)

(Was it cruel of her to trap the Master as she did on twentieth century earth, seventy-seven years from his TARDIS? He never could stay still either.)

(It _was_ cruel of her to trap River’s consciousness in the Library.)

Nine thousand and seven hundred marks on the wall and the thought finally wanders into her head that the metacrisis Doctor trapped with Rose will never know any of the things the Master and the Matrix revealed to her. He won’t ever have to know what it was like to lose Gallifrey again. ( _Again_.)

She tries to imagine what the man must be like. Is he as fierce and frightening as she had thought he could be? Is he merciless and withdrawn? Cold and callous and maybe even cruel? Does he use to mask the pain or has he allowed himself to try and heal? How much of Donna lives on in him, his attitudes and mannerisms and vocabulary? How does he dress? Do his feet itch for travel or is he happy taking the slow path? Is he good enough for Rose?

(The answer to that last one is the same as it has always been: No. No version of the Doctor will ever be worthy of the love that particular human has for him.)

The Doctor is old enough to admit that she had sent the metacrisis away because she was scared. She wasn’t scared of what he would do, but of _him_. Of watching herself age, watching time actually take its dues.

That night, staring blankly at the wall, she tries very hard to focus on rewatching a cartoon movie in her head and not on the twenty-one centuries it’s been since she last saw Rose or the far far fewer finitely numbered years a human being can at maximum live.

(Two more days later she thinks of River Song, with her fully-human parents and her one human heart and her hundreds of years of life lived anyway. The implications that has, the unknowns that creates for her duplicate self keep her awake for weeks.)

Davros’ words, on that crucible ship in the Medusa Cascade, occupy her mind far more than any other singular topic, even things not half as specific.

Rose and Donna and Martha and Sarah Jane and Mickey and Jackie and Jack himself, all ready to give up everything including their innocence and their lives so that she didn’t need to dirty her own hands.

Mickey and Jackie had _guns_. Jackie, Rose’s fierce and fantastic and slightly terrifying mother who before meeting the Doctor had been best armed with a slap, _killing Daleks in the Doctor’s name_.

Who was the man in Gloucester with the chameleon arch version of fugitive-her? Lee? She’s not even sure if that’s his real name, but she knows he gave his life to protect her in ways more than dying. He took the slow path, living on Earth in England for over twenty years. Living with—married to!—a Doctor who didn’t even know to remember she was the Doctor.

(Not for the first time, the Doctor lets the guilt about doing the same to Martha take her nearly to tears.)

And then there was River Song—Melody Pond—taken from her parents as a _baby_ and deliberately fashioned into a weapon out of fear. Fear for the Doctor and all the destruction brought everywhere she goes. 

(She refuses to think at all about Clara, dying for her again and again and again and again and again, over and over and over as so very many echoes through so very many different points in her life.)

(Maybe, the Doctor considers, she truly does deserve to be in prison.)

  
  
  


####  _3\. (revolution of the daleks)_

Years and years and years and years worth of tally marks on the walls later, she hears an old familiar voice and considers for just half a moment if she may have possibly, finally, _actually_ gone mad.

“What about this face?” the voice from her past says. “Remember this?”

“Jack,” she breathes. Then she spins, forgetting whatever had held her attention a moment ago and looks at him. Rushes forward to take in the smile that seems half scared, the red prison jumpsuit that is identical to her own. Looks at _him_ , looks at—“Jack!”

“I knew you would look better in these colors than me.” His smile settles into something gentler, softer, less worried, and he salutes her the way he has so often in the past. “Hello, Doctor.”

“What are you doing here?”

He breathes out half a chuckle, like he thinks she’s silly for asking. “What do you think I’m doing here? Breaking you out.”

They exchange more words, but the entire time he’s talking about his breakout ball, most of what her bright and always spinning mind comes up with is this: Jack Harkness is here. Jack Harkness is _here_.

Here, in this brutal and dull and brutally dull prison. Here, where anything not bleak and dark would stand out so very much. How did she not feel it? How did she not notice such a blindingly bright fixed point right in her periphery?

She squints up at him— _up_ , that’s new!—and asks: “Have you had work done?” What she means is, have you met another Time Lord? Have you had _something_ done, something to reduce the strain your existence puts on the universe?

He just laughs, makes a joke about how she doesn't han’t have room to talk, and at this incredibly close proximity she can tell he hasn’t had anything really change about him at all. A few more lines in the face, a bit more of the weariness and wisdom of age in his eyes, but… He’s still himself, still _immortal_ , still sentenced to live out the rest of existence. Static. Stuck.

But he’s come to unstick her, and her hearts feel full with a mix of joy and relief and guilt that she should really be used to by now.

(She _is_ used to it, but that doesn’t make it much easier.)

(When Jack hugs her, tight to his chest like she’s the best thing he’s ever had in his arms. it is the most comforting thing she’s felt in years. Her fingers dig into his shoulders as she clings back.)

Being back in her own TARDIS is the most incredible feeling of coming home, if home is a place that can think and feel and be as glad to welcome her back as she is to be welcomed. The Doctor gasps, staring at the cool blue lighting and the beautiful hexagonal patterns everywhere and the crystalline structures of the pillars and the faint golden glow of the console and the time rotor and—”I’m _back_ ,” she breathes, stepping down the stairs, touching the metal at the base of one of the pillars with absolute reverence. This is the first she’s truly felt safe in an entire century. “My own TARDIS.”

She points at Jack, still standing at the top of the little set of stairs where they beamed in. “Captain Jack Harkness. _Gold star for rescuing_.”

“Told your friends, if you ever need help I’d be there.” He even chuckles a little, like it’s a given. A fact. Something she would be silly for ever doubting. He’s still talking as he clomps down the stairs, admiring the new TARDIS desktop, but at the moment only has eyes and attention for how the ship will react to the unnatural nature of his presence—until he asks: “Which way’s my room?”

“You don’t have a room. You’ve never had a room.”

Jack just brushes the words off like the lie they are and follows her to where the TARDIS has provided clean fresh clothes for both of them, saying what they both know: “I had a suite. With its own cocktail lounge.” She doesn’t reply and there’s barely a pause before he switches topics. “They gave you my message? About the Lone Cyberman? You didn’t give it the Cyberium?”

She almost winces. Almost. Oh how she hates that that’s a question. Oh how she hates him knowing that she failed.

“It’s a long story,” she says, trying to deflect.

“What?” And the Doctor can hear it in his voice, the bafflement and the disappointment and oh, is that even a bit of hurt?

“I fixed it,” she reassures. “Eventually. Just about. Sort of.” (Not at all.)

“Why were you in prison in the first place?”

She focuses on the TARDIS console so that she doesn’t have to see his reaction. “Evading the Judoon. Twice at once. And once I was in they took seven thousand other offenses into consideration.”

“They stopped at seven?” he asks, and even though there’s a smile in his voice the question strikes too close to home in an awful way.

The Doctor still doesn’t look at him as she responds, giving him just a little bit more of her painful truth. “I was imprisoned for being me, right at the point where I wasn’t sure what that meant. Oh, it’s been a tough few decades.” A tough ninety-seven years, but who’s counting?

She doesn’t _need_ to be looking at him to feel how his smile falls, good humor crumbling under concern. “You’re okay now, yeah?” And maybe she’s fooling herself by thinking it, but he sounds _supportive_. Like he’s ready to catch her if she’s going to fall apart.

That isn’t something she can deal with right now, not after having just had so much (too much) time to think, so she mumbles something about how she guesses they’ll find out and turns a crank to bring the TARDIS back up to full power.

She mentions that there are three very special people she’s missed—her _fam_ —and he gives her a much-expected flirty little look. “One of them was me, right?”

“You never change.” Her tone is disappointed and fond in equal measure. Jack remaining Jack remaining Jack is one of the few constants left to her in the universe. A comfort, even despite the wrongness of him.

He chuckles quietly, cheekily, eyebrows waggling in a suggestive way. “Wish I could say the same.

This isn’t the first time he’s said something like this since in the short time they’ve been together now and it makes the Doctor go still, hands pausing as she stops to look at him. Her whole demeanor shifts as this hits her—and oh. Does he wish the same constancy from her as she adores from him? The one thing about herself that she can never, _never_ guarantee?

(Rose flashes vividly through her memory, distressed, tearfully begging her soon-to-be-pinstriped self to please _change back_.)

“Not the upgrade I’ve been saying it is, then?” She forces her voice to have cheer she doesn’t feel, hoping being chipper can hide everything.

“What? No…” Jack starts, but she just barrels on.

“Is it the height? I am a bit short, aren’t I? These _legs_ , they almost got me killed right as soon as I got this face, being so much shorter than I expected. Oh! And still not ginger. Eyebrows are better this time than last though, and my face isn’t full chin…”

It’s unexpected when Jack steps forward, grabbing her gently by the shoulders. The sudden nearness of the anomaly of his existence startles her into silence.

“ _Doctor_ ,” he says firmly. “I didn’t say I didn’t like the face.”

She scrunches up her nose. “You did imply it.” (Again.)

“Well.” He swallows almost nervously, and that’s new for him isn’t it? Nerves? “My mistake, then. Doctor.. Doctor, the face you wear has never once mattered to me. You were beautiful with big ears and a leather jacket and you’re beautiful now, still all… all energy and light and storms inside you like something wild and fae and untameable—and do you have some sort of honesty filter on you? Because I really didn’t intend to say all that.”

The Doctor sort of smiles, stunned and absolutely not having expected any of that. “Just one of those faces, I guess. You’re not the first to say more than he meant.”

Jack grins, a flash of white teeth in the dim light of the console room. “Why am I entirely not surprised I’m not the first to unintentionally profess his undying love to you? Hey, are those rumors about Nikola Tesla true?”

She blinks at him, surprised by the mention of Tesla. She is more surprised however by the mention of _love_. Deflect, deflect, deflect. Run. “Who said anything about love? I thought we were talking about my appearance.”

“Doctor, don’t play the fool.”

He lifts a hand to cup the side of her face and she notices his fingers are trembling. In days gone by she would provably have reveled in having this effect on someone like Jack, but right now she would very much like to escape. To _do something_ instead of thinking about herself. 

“Your entire existence,” Jack says, “is the most wonderful and inspiring thing I have ever encountered. I’ve loved you for almost as long as I’ve been alive, and definitely for as long as I’ve known you.”

Before she can say anything he’s taking a deep breath and soldiering on. “I would really like to kiss you now, if that’s okay.”

And this? This is perfect ammunition for further deflection, for further distance, and she seizes upon it. The little smile she pastes on as she pulls away a bit isn’t even entirely fake. “Since when do you ask permission?”

He chuckles quietly, admitting defeat by letting go of her, letting her out space between them. “Since I decided I really, really don’t want you to kick me out of the TARDIS for being too forward with you.”

A bit too late for that, she thinks. Not that she will kick him out, not this time, but the forwardness… Yes, this has been too forward. 

“The caution’s not because I’m a woman now, then?” the Doctor asks, already knowing that it isn’t. Knowing he’ll either take that as a personal insult or a criticism of the narrowmindedness of humans or both. But a subject change is a subject change is a subject change, and better to be a bit mean than have him thinking her worthy of his love.

Jack visibly struggles to not roll his eyes. “You’re _you_. Man, woman, neither, both… It doesn’t change how I feel. How I’ve always felt.”

She presses her lips together in a thin line. “What if I’m not who you thought?”

“You’re still the Doctor,” he tells her.

He’s right, but if life has taught her anything it’s that the Doctor isn’t someone who deserves the kind of love he seems to be offering.

(She thinks again about Davros pointing out how she took her friends and made them people who would kill and die in her name.)

(She thinks about Ruth’s Lee, a man who cared for her and protected her and died for her. A man she doesn’t even remember.)  
  


Once the TARDIS is in Sheffield, she barrels towards the doors and out of them, bursting into Gaham’s front room.

“Hi!” she says, and now the cheer isn’t forced nearly as much. It’s so good to see them, _so good_. “I was in space jail.”

“You wot?” Graham asks, but she doesn’t bother to (doesn’t _want_ to) explain, instead choosing to make introductions for Jack. Jack, who wastes no time in flirting with her friends.

Yaz steps forward and the Doctor is, for a fraction of part of an instant, prepared for the hug she thinks is coming.

What she isn’t prepared for is the hard shove that sends her stumbling backwards. Yaz’s shout—“We were worried about you!”—nearly falls on deaf ears because for a moment she is back in the Matrix, re-living pushing the Master to the ground.

“What? How long has it been?” And the Doctor doesn’t give them time to answer, spouting off short and then slightly longer periods of time—days? weeks?—because no, no, please…

“Ten months,” Ryan says, somber and serious.

Jack says something behind her but she doesn’t listen, can’t listen, because she cannot have done this (again). “I’m sorry,” she tells them, and Ryan just shrugs a little.

“Yeah, well, it’s done now, so…” And she can see in his kind eyes that he doesn’t blame her, but he also won’t forgive.

They’re disappointed, and the hurt from having hurt them is only surpassed by the fear that shoots through the whole of her being when Jack asks what’s happening on planet Earth and they respond with that horrible, awful word:

“Dalek.”

Everyone is back on the TARDIS when her own history catches up to her (again) as Jack foolishly mentions his _first death_. 

(To say Jack is being foolish to talk about it isn’t quite right. It was foolish—selfish—on _her_ part to believe she could protect the fam from the mistakes of her past, but oh she did try.)

“I can be killed but I come back to life pretty quick,” he says. He sounds cavalier about it at least, like it’s a wound that no longer festers. “Partially her fault”—and here Jack points towards the Doctor, who makes a face because she is (always) doing her best to Not Think About This—”partially a friend of hers on Earth called Rose. But she’s trapped in a parallel universe now.”

The Doctor’s breath catches in her chest, respiratory bypass stalling too. She doesn’t look at Jack, for a second she doesn’t even _think_. The pain isn’t fresh, it’s been so long, but it’s still present. It still hurts.

(It hurts more after all the thinking she had time for in prison. That half-human metacrisis… How _long_ will his life stretch past Rose‘s?)

“She’s what?” Yaz squawks, in perfect Yaz fashion.

Don’t worry, the Doctor wants to say, She’s not trapped _alone_. She’s not alone because she has her family and she has _me_ , the only version of _me_ that won’t ever leave her (again). The Doctor wants to say this, but she doesn’t. 

An alert sounds before she can think more on it, a mercy gift from the TARDIS trying to end this painful bit of exposition. 

They split up, separating to go to Osaka and to go see Robertson. It’s during this time, when the TARDIS is a bit empty, that the Doctor finds Ryan sitting alone in the console room.

Their conversation is light at first, or at least she tries to keep it that way. Hats are a safe topic, right? Hats are cool? But he won’t really look at her and the strained silence between them is louder than the gentle hum and whir of the TARDIS making its way through the vortex, so she just sighs and walks away.

“Four minutes to Osaka,” she says with forced cheer, giving up on the conversation.

“Yeah,” Ryan replies simply. “Okay.”

Except… she can’t give up, can she? Not on this, not on trying to find a way to ease things between them. In her mind's eye she can still see Ryan standing there on that TARDIS she sent them home from Gallifrey in, pulling Yaz back. What has traveling with her done to this young man? The guilt claws itself out of her lungs and forces her to speak.

She turns around, back to the console, and faces him. “I’m sorry. About the ten months. More sorry than I can ever really say.”

He gets up from where he’s sitting and walks past her, towards the console.

“I missed you all,” she tries. “So much.”

“Yeah. We missed you too.”

“But you been good?” She needs him to say yes but she also sort of selfishly, horrible wishes that he would say no. That he would admit to needing her.

“Yeah,” he says, and it is a shamefully difficult struggle to be glad about it. “Maybe it’s what I needed.”

The Doctor looks down, so hurt but still trying to keep a cheery face. “Oh, yeah. Maybe it was.”

They chatter a bit about Ryan’s dad, but it’s… strained, stilted. “Lots to be done here on Earth,” Ryan tells her, and she gets a sinking feeling.

“Yeah. Always. Sounds like you enjoyed being back.” And she’s trying not to sound upset, she really is.

“It’s home,” Ryan says with a shrug, and the sinking feeling deepens.

Home. Hers is gone now, again. And maybe it’s because she knows she’s already lost him that she tells him the truth about what happened on Gallifrey when he asks, that she gives in so quickly when he asks what the Master wanted. Her cheery response that it doesn’t matter is met with him calling her out on it, and she folds like wet paper. Less of a fold, even, more of a… more of a something. Something more sad.

Crumples. That’s a good word for it, probably, she thinks. The Doctor’s resolve _crumples_.

She sits on the steps, and she tells him: she’s not who she thought he was, her life isn’t what she thought it was. _She’s not even Gallifreyan_.

“Seriously?” he asks, seeking eye contact she can’t give him. “And how do you feel about that?” It’s some sort of psychology trick employed by therapists, asking her how she feels. Very human. But it works.

She sighs, and she admits: “Angry. While I was locked away, all I kept thinking was… if I’m not who I thought I was, then who am I?”

“You’re the Doctor. Same as before, same as always.”

(Just like Jack had said. Just, she realizes, like she had known when talking to the futitive-Doctor in the long-ago version of this very same TARDIS.)

“Right. Same Doctor. Same Ryan. Nothing’s changed.”

“No,” he says with a sigh, coming to sit next to her. Lot of sighing happening on her TARDIS today. “I didn’t say that, did I? Things change, all the time. And they should, cause they haveta. Sometimes we get a bit scared, cause new can be a bit scary, right?”

“New can be very scary.”

He looks her in the eyes and she meets them, feeling sad and vulnerable.

“So when we’re done with this Dalek problem, you find out about your own life. Confront the new, or the old. And then everything will be alright.”

“Will it?”

“No doubt.”

She sort of smiles. He's either naive or sweet to lie.

“What?” he asks, a little self-conscious.

“Thank you, Ryan. For being my friend.”

He thanks her back, but it still sounds like the beginning of a goodbye.

A lot happens in such a terribly short period of time. It isn’t fun, it isn’t easy, but it helps settle her need to move, to do; to stop _thinking_ and focus on action after so long standing still.

The Daleks, in their horrible greenhouse farm. Taking the nuclear option and bringing _more_ to earth so they can eliminate the first.

(That moment where she and Jack look at each other and the silent, visible, lightning-fast fight he has with himself because he also can’t see any other way to stop this disaster.)

(That awful businessman who isn’t Ed Sheeran but who _is_ the first human in a long time that she has considered _just letting die_.)

It’s a lot, even for her, even for how the doing of it soothes her restlessness. Between that and having accidentally abandoned them for _ten months_ … Well, as sad as it makes her, she stil can’t exactly fault Graham and Ryan for their decisions to stay on Earth.

After Ryan has given her the goodbye she’s known all day has been coming, Graham looks at her with the fondest but saddest eyes. “I remember what you said, that we wouldn’t come back the same people. And you’re right, just... not in the way that I thought.”

And she knows then (again) that what Davros had accused her of will always be true. She takes her humans—her gentle and bright and good humans—and fashions them into tools and weapons and breaks them in the process. 

  
  
  


####  _4\. (after)_

The Doctor tries to be courteous enough to allow Jack Harkness and Gwen Cooper time for tea or coffee or liquor or bountiful amnestics or whatever it is Torchwood agents imbibe together, before she goes to Cardiff to pick him up. She tries, and she succeeds only because being in a time machine lets her skip the waiting.

(The TARDIS cooperates and gets her there on time, and she can _feel_ how sorry it is for miss-timing those ten months.)

“Did she ever know?” Jack asks, apropos of nothing as she plugs commands into the TARDIS to get them back into the vortex and away from all this pain. His gaze is heavy even though she doesn’t (can’t) meet it.

The Doctor stares at the controls, uncomprehending. There are near innumerable different subjects he could be asking about, so many different shes and so very, very many different things. “Who know what? Green lever, please.”

Jack pulls down on the appropriate lever, the weight of his focus heavy on her despite the distraction she tries to give him. “Did Rose ever… Did you tell her, Doctor?”

She takes a breath, the pain and guilt from remembering _that_ she and _those_ things still so sharp and shattering. She doesn’t even need to know exactly what he’s talking about to have an answer. “Lots I probably should have told Rose. Never did.”

He doesn’t say more on the matter, but for some reason she just can’t let things go. Too much thinking time lately. Too much honesty today, when honesty has never before felt so much like a relief.

(Was it wrong of her, opening up to Ryan? Is that part of why he left?)

“I wish I had,” she admits, only because she thinks he might understand. “I wish I had said so much, Jack. To more than Rose.”

There’s the soft sound of a tired sigh and she looks up at her old, possibly _oldest_ friend.

(That title used to belong to the Master. Oh, oh, how things change.)

“I think I get what you mean now,” Jack replies. He sounds sad and resigned all at once, looks tired and weary and aged.

The Doctor wonders suddenly how far back in his timeline, how many years before the prison break it was that he lost Gwen Cooper?

She looks away but then back immediately, suddenly intent on taking in the sight of him. Taking in the fixed point and the wrongness of his existence, yes, but also the brilliance of it. If she steps past the guilt of leaving him, sidles past the incredible unsease she feels at the magnitude of how she has helped doom him, there is a deep welling of empathy and something else that feels like love.

She is apparently now (again) a person who doesn’t fault people for things they could not control.

“I should never have left you,” she finds herself saying, aching with the truth. Aching with how good it feels to speak it, to stop _hiding_ and covering and concealing for just a little while. The conversation with Ryan had been a taste of it, but it is easier to open up to someone who may actually understand. “Not the first time, not any of the others.”

“Doctor, it’s been _literal_ millennia...”

“Or it’s been billions of years, but that doesn’t make it less true. You’re impossible and beautiful and I’ve been such a fool and a coward for so long.” She sighs. “I’m old, Jack. I’m so old now.”

He stuffs his hands in his coat pockets and tries for a joke. “Lookin’ good for several billion.”

It succeeds in getting half a smile out of her, corners of her lips quirking upwards just a bit. “That were a bit of dramatics; four billion or so were in a time loop. But it’s easier to think about time I can sort-of remember than time I can’t at all—though I could be just about a billion, for all I know. Definitely millions.” A near incomprehensible amount of time to live, even for her, even for a Time Lord, even for someone who has endured nearly three conscious millennia. “I’m older than the Time Lords, older than the Citadel and regeneration and things I have always accepted as history. I wasn’t even born on Gallifrey.”

“How did you…” He trails off, visibly unsure of what he wants to ask. How did it happen? How did she find out?

“The Master,” she states simply. Someday she undoubtedly will let out the entire story, but not today.

“And you believe him?” Jack sounds like he very much thinks she should not.

The Doctor sighs. “I believe myself. Had a run-in with a me I didn’t know, and that me didn’t know this me.” Something uncomfortable occurs to her. “Jack, have you ever heard of a group from Gallifrey called the Division?”

She doesn’t miss the way he suddenly stands a bit straighter, looks a bit older. “The Division? Fewer rumors in the Time Agency than we had about even the Time Lords, but there were still rumors. Why?”

“I think I worked for them. I think I worked for them possibly against my will and for so long that they gave me a reward: retirement. A second life with no trace at all of the first left in my head.”

“Fuck,” Jack breathes, and the TARDIS must agree, letting him use that language right in her console room without the translation circuits filtering it out. 

“Still want to travel with me? Knowing I’m not who you thought I am?” She is so, so worried the answer will be no.

He steps towards her, edging just near to her personal space. When he speaks his voice is gentle. “Doctor, do you remember what I said before about loving you?”

She shrugs a little, not wanting to say yes.

(Is this embarrassment that she’s feeling at being talked to in such a kind and reassuring way, or is it self-loathing?)

(She does not deserve the kindness this man continues and continues to offer.)

“This,” Jack says, gesturing vaguely, “what you’ve said, what you’ve learned? It still doesn’t change that.”

The Doctor huffs out a sound that’s somewhere between an airy chuckle and a dry sob. “I really don’t deserve that kind of faith, Jack.”

“Too bad.”

And then he’s _in_ her personal space, his hands are gently cupping her face like it is the most precious thing he has ever touched, and he is kissing her.

This isn’t anything like the only kiss she has shared with Jack before, all the way back on the game station when she had big ears and a leather jacket—but it isn’t that it’s dissimilar because of the physical differences.

It is dissimilar because right now neither of them believes wholly and fully that this is the end of their life.

They aren’t about to die. There is no encroaching Dalek army (anymore), no current limit on their time at all. This kiss, this gentle and hopeful and sweet brush of lips, it isn’t a desperate and sad end. It’s a beginning.

That thought must pass to him, a side effect of touch telepathy and devotion and exhaustion, because he pulls away to look at her.

“Do you _want_ this to be a beginning?”

Her lips quirk up into something like a smile. “Bit old for beginnings, me.”

He smiles back at her so gently, overly fond. “No such thing.”

“Oh,” the Doctor says, the word a sigh. She’s ready to admit something big, she supposes. “You scare me a little, Jack.”

He backs off immediately, going so far as to take a step away. “Scare you?” His voice is hesitant, concerned.

“Human lives are so short. I’m already mourning everyone, as soon as I meet them, ‘cause you’ll all just be gone in a blink for me. Everyone ‘cept you. You’re fixed permanent. I’ll never _have_ to say goodbye to you. Being in the human’s shoes but knowing exactly how you’ll feel once I’m gone is… I don’t like it.”

“How about being in the Doctor’s shoes, then? The Doctor, who’s not gonna let worrying about how I’ll feel in two or ten or fifty thousand years get in the way of something that could make us both so much happier in the meantime?” There’s hope and conviction together in his voice, along with so much love it makes her hearts ache.

When she approaches him and gets on her tiptoes to press her lips to his again, it’s like kissing a black hole. Like kissing ice that’s on fire while standing inside a dying star. Strange and oddly all-consuming.

Being this close to the anomaly that is Jack Harkness hurts, but it hurts in a way that she doesn’t really mind. It hurts like the burn in your muscles and in your lungs after a good run.

(She is so, so good at running.)

(Maybe, though, it would be nice to at least take a break from running from _herself_.)

When they separate, she is smiling.

“Let’s take a trip,” she tells Jack. “You, me, Yaz.”

Her TARDIS makes a high humming noise. The sound isn’t happy, but it is hopeful and that’s better than she could want to ask for.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> This was originally a much shorter study of the Doctor's feelings during that brilliant scene in the Matrix Chamber, but. Well. 
> 
> You can find me on twitter at @krebshouting. Sometimes I tweet bits of WIPs (including a Jack POV sequel-of-sorts to this).


End file.
